Thursday, November 1, 2012

Around 8:15 a.m. or so... As you would expect, a lot of activity at the Con Ed substation (it doesn't look so busy in this photo, just trust me...)

...a common sight... hydrants are open... I saw a few residents of the Lillian Wald houses fill up buckets and take them back inside the buildings...

The remnants of a big tree that fell on East Seventh Street near Avenue C....

It is difficult to tell how much damage there are to the businesses and buildings on the parts of Avenue C and D that were flooded (I believe the water stopped around East Fifth Street at Avenue C) ... Most places look fine on the outside, where the gates are down. I know there are many flooded basements. Yesterday, there were all sorts of gas-powered pumps in action.

The Associated on Avenue C at East Eight Street was hit particularly hard. There appeared to be an inch of water on the floor this morning. A worker was carrying out bags of mucky products.

I'm still playing catch-up with all this. Please let me know if you have any updates or anything Sandy related.

14 comments:

Anonymous
said...

The city, state, and federal government are treating lower Manhattan just as the Bush administration treated New Orleans. ConEd is not being taken to task, the cell phone operators are home free, there is no food and water distribution and nobody looking after the elderly.

@Anon 11:39 AM - I am no fan of Cuomo but he made very strong statements yesterday taking all the public utilities to task yesterday.

“The state regulates these utilities, and it’s my intention to take into consideration the way the utilities handle this restoration when it comes to their regulation and their licensing, Cuomo said last night.

“The utilities work for the people of this state, and the state is the regulator to make sure that they are performing their services adequately and responsibly. I believe how they prepared for the storm and how they repair after the storm is indicative and evidentiary of how well they are performing for the people of this. So I fully intend to hold them accountable and I’ve informed them as such.”

@Anonymous - if what you say is true (and I do not doubt one word of what you say) - that is shameful and distugting. We are finding out our government and its puppet agencies that spend OUR tax dollars have NO shame and most certainly NO accountability. Same goes for big businesses like cell phone companies, power companies, etc.. Where is FEMA? Where is the city relief OEM? From what I've read and been confirmed from people - the ONLY such relief efforts are coming from the coalition of Occupy Wall Street and 350.org groups that have formed SANDYVOLUNTEERS. Of course there's NO media coverage of this as that would give credibility to those groups. I personally say THANK YOU to those people. When I feel a bit better, I will be with them in the streets helping my fellow human beings. If anyone feels so inclined (and I would say if you are able to - do it) look up that group name on Twitter and google and help our neighbors. "We're all in this together"

Joe Blow - the generator blowup is not the cause of the outage even though it made for impressive videos. Apparently none of their relays were protected from flooding and all 11 circuits feeding lower manhattan had to be shut down.

Walking through the neighborhood on Tuesday afternoon, E. 7th St. between B and C was noticeably wetter (building to sidewalk to street to sidewalk to building) than other streets further west, and the cars parked along it had watermarks and dried debris to the middle of their tires and lower door level. A block resident (who seems do a lot of hanging out the window talking with folks as they pass by) confirmed that E. 7th St. between B and C had had a foot of water, and that the water had extended almost to Avenue B.

A resident of the houses east of Avenue D on E. 6th St. (who did not evacuate) told me that the water had risen to the top of large SUVs (sounds like nearly 6 ft), and had receded by 5am Tuesday.

You're confusing correlation with causality. The transformer or generator or whatever it was, could have exploded for the same reason that the relays failed - they all got flooded.

Whatever the reason is, Con Ed obviously had no protection from flooding, even after they got a very real wake up call last year in the form of Irene. Unfortunately, being the private/public hybrid that they are, they have zero liability unless someone (the state AG being the obvious) sues them and shows they've failed to act appropriately.

I am interested for my own edification on what happened. It seems that if ConEd is stating that it was a controlled shut down, that wouldn't cause an explosion at a transformer (I didn't think it was a generator that exploded).

My very rudimentary understanding of the electrical system is that transformers take high voltage inputs and transform them into a voltage that can be used by consumers.

So if the relays were flooded, would that cause some sort of back-up at the transformer?

Possibly. I think the only way we'll know the truth about this is via a criminal investigation. The important number right now is the number of Manhattan customers who got power back over the past 24 hours:

Zero.

ConEd PR dept has switched from "all power back to Manhattan Fri-Sat" to "all power back by Sat 11pm". I wouldn't count on that one either.

The National Guard came with FEMA-supplied food. They were here all morning (November 2nd) at a food distribution center they set up on 10th Street and Avenue D and we saw them giving out a huge amount of food. There were flyers or labels of some kind that had the word "FEMA" on them, so assumed it was FEMA food. There were National Guard soldiers there and a couple of military-type trucks.

Heard they distributed food on November 1st too, but didn't go over to 10th & D that day so can't say for sure.

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